Author: Matthew R. Francis
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Bicycles, networks, and biological homeostasis
The linked article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The audience for this magazine, in other words, is professional mathematicians and related researchers working in a wide variety of fields. While this article contains equations, I wrote it to be understandable even if you…
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Coding complicity in police violence
Occasionally people (usually my fellow white men) yell at me to “stick to science!” Well, sticking to science is a luxury that white women and scientists of color can’t afford, and pretending scientists aren’t complicit in violence toward underrepresented groups preserves inequality. At the same time, some within the broad tent of STEM (science, technology,…
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Ecological stability far from equilibrium
The linked article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The audience for this magazine, in other words, is professional mathematicians and related researchers working in a wide variety of fields. While this article contains equations, I wrote it to be understandable even if you…
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The cost of “herd immunity” for COVID-19 is too high
My latest comic with Maki Naro is up at The Nib, the award-winning nonfiction comics site! This time we tackle the question of “herd immunity” for the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been suggested by a number of politicians as a strategy for beating the disease. As Maki and I describe, without a vaccine, this is…
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Sizing up the weirdest objects in the universe
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] How big is a neutron star? Astrophysicists are combining multiple methods to reveal the secrets of some of the weirdest objects in the universe. For Symmetry Magazine: Neutron stars…
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Cold War treaties aren’t sufficient for the era of asteroid mining
Why did I, a physics/astronomy journalist, write about asteroids for a deep-sea mining trade magazine? Read on! Oh yes, and pledge to my book of science comics with Maki Naro, Who Owns an Asteroid? [ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the…
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Fighting racial gerrymandering with math
The linked article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The audience for this magazine, in other words, is professional mathematicians and related researchers working in a wide variety of fields. While this article contains equations, I wrote it to be understandable even if you…
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R0, mortality rate, and all that: the science of how disease spreads
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] The science of how diseases spread How epidemiology puts the COVID-19 virus in perspective. For Popular Science: Scientists, medical professionals, and governments around the world are working to understand…
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Weird discrepancy in cosmic measurements has cosmologists puzzled
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] The growing crisis in cosmology For The Week: How rapidly is the universe expanding? Since Edwin Hubble first discovered in 1929 that galaxies are getting farther apart over time,…
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The threat of AI comes from inside the house
My other SIAM News contributions are necessarily math-focused. This one is a bit different: a review of a very good and funny popular-science book about machine learning and its failures. [ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write!…
Bowler Hat Science 